In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy disrupts narratives of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that reduce Africans in the Americas to displaced flesh cargo forcefully comported and emplaced in the New World. Gilroy theorizes the Black Atlantic as a dynamic geography in which the entanglement of routes of movement and roots of cultural identity are negotiated and constitutive of new expressions and experience of Black identity which is neither Afrocentric nor confined to national boundaries. This conceptualization reworks notions of diaspora, homeland, movement and place in ways that call attention to the ongoingness of political economic, cultural, and ethno-racial processes of Atlantic modernity. The Black Atlantic and Gilroy’s subsequent works have been influential in the emergence of an explicit focus on the spatialities and mobilities of Black identity and culture.

This session seeks to explore the ways in which the concept of the Black Atlantic has been theoretically and empirically employed and reframed among geographers, and the implications of this work for the present and the future of Black geographies and anti-racist futures. We invite individuals who have engaged with Gilroy’s work across the discipline of Geography to submit abstracts. Themes and topics may include but are not limited to:

Afro-indigenous identity and environmental movements

Maroonage and Black resistance

Black mobilities (people and ideas)

Black geographies beyond the Atlantic

Afro-Asiatic geographies

Circulation of global racial hierarchies

Networks of resistance

Black subalterity

“New” diasporas

Transnational Black cultural production

Limitations of the Black Atlantic analytic

If you are interested in taking part in this session please send your abstract (250 words maximum) no later than Friday, October 20, 2017 to Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen (LWyrtzen@clarku.edu) or Alex Moulton (AMoulton@clarku.edu). Decision on papers will be communicated no later than October 23.